War Without End

"War makes thieves, and peace hangs them." --Niccolo Machiavelli

"There are possibly many other people (held at Guantanamo who've been tortured) who are not going to be able to be tried but who nevertheless are dangerous to this country. We're going to have to try to figure out what we do with them." --Eric Holder, Attorney-General designate.

There was a time when many of us sought passionately to uncover the truth of that fateful day in September of 2001. Many of us researched tirelessly--straining to make sense of that spectacular atrocity and expose the culprits that allowed it to happen. We discovered a great deal-- far more than what was divulged by the compromised and compromising 9-11 Commission. Finally, after being frustrated at every turn, alarmed by the indifference and the venality of our Washington politicians many of us have settled upon a darker, more dismal truth, one that the cynics understood from the beginning. Tragically, it does not matter.

To understand how it could be that the world's oldest and most powerful democracy was able to eviscerate its own constitution and the basis for international law with such thoughtless abandon one merely has to observe the calamities still shaking up Wall Street. What has become clear with each new scandal and beggaring revelation is that we have arrived at a stage in economic history where corporate market capitalism, like the African slave trade, amounts to sanctioned extortion and legalized theft. The "malefactors of great wealth" who Theodore Roosevelt warned us of a century ago have through their relentless promulgation of the creed of unbridled profit succeeded in destroying the ability of governments -- by which I mean the supposed elected representatives of "we the people"-- to set the rules of fair and free trade and see them enforced.

Asymmetrical Warfare

There was a time not long ago when the people were feared by the bankers and plutocrats. Our threat was made palpable by the dramatic revolutions that produced the Soviet Union and Communist China. But like the original inhabitants of this bounteous land because our grasp of what constitutes real theft is so miserably small we can still be tricked with liquor and trinkets. The battle was won the moment the respect for justice was usurped by the power of purchase. Once over half the world accepted that it was in the nature of life that one's man's loss was another man's gain, for the uber-national, moneyed classes it became merely a matter of buying off the workers and funding a giant army of mercenaries. The poor either acceded to some piteous script or as we observed after Katrina and are now witnessing in the camps of Gaza and vales of Afghanistan you either surrender your land and your rights or risk losing your life.

We the people have awakened too late to see how badly we'd been tricked. As Mr. Holder makes abundantly clear, the promised land will not be reached under an Obama administration. Should there be Peace there will come a Reckoning. And then who would we trust to continue the governing?